SageGreenJournal.org
voices out of the West, mostly poetry, personal to planetary
David Chorlton
Phoenix, Arizona
David writes: "I live with a European past, replete with memories of art galleries plus a love of music, and a present rooted on the Southwest desert. Most of my learning has come from reading across a broad spectrum of poetry, and my writing has edged a little more toward the natural world as "nature poetry" no longer has the reassuring and bucolic implications it had when I was at school. Readings are always a special events for me, and I'd go so far as saying that a poem read aloud is in its final draft."
David Cholton reading
accompanied by his wife Roberta
David's books include:Bird on a Wire(Presa Press, 2017),A Field Guide to Fire(FutureCycle Press, 2015),Selected Poems(FutureCycle Press, 2014),The Devil's Sonata (FutureCycle Press, 2012),Waiting for the Quetzal (March Street Press, 2006),Return to Waking Life(Main Street Rag, 2004),A Normal Day Amazes Us (Kings Estate Press, 2003),and Forget the Country You Came From (Singular Street, 1992)
David received The Slipstream Chapbook Award (2009) for The Age of Miracles and The Ronald Wardall Prize from Rain Mountain Press (2008) for for the chapbook manuscript, The Lost River.
The Way to the Gray Hawk
David Chorlton
Clouds well up into a chorus of light
above summer hills
stripped to their contours
by each peal of thunder
that rolls across them as sound
casting a shadow.
In the tangles
of birdsong along every trail
through ash and mesquite
the hard throated call
from a cuckoo keeps up
an insistent tease until
slender wings flash
where they glide into view
for a second and away to where time
cannot reach.
The way is marked
by the hallucinogenic glow
on the sacred petals
of Datura growing at the intersection
of reality and delirium.
Leaves pull
together; the sky is held in trust
all the way along the path the erstwhile
railway ran, where now
the trees leave space
only for its memory to pass
between them, followed by
a raven’s call.
Still far to go
and the sun is low
as edges rich in color draw the shapes
of cottonwoods within them.
Another day;
the grass is wet and darkness
turns into a heron on the creek,
gone in a wingflap
leaving green behind in overlapping
shades past fallen trunks
whose textures of decay
lie richly on the earth,
and farther along the circuitous way
leading into and out of
the secrets that grow
in riparian shade, the search continues
with no end in sight.
Looking up,
ever up high among the tall and leaning
boughs, some broken
and some twisted, some tapering
to a dead point with no foliage,
some holding a nest, leads only to
the clear blue beyond
all that is known, until
a Gray Hawk's cry
is a fingernail scraping across
the sky.